


Tricks

by dutchydoescoke



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2013-11-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 20:08:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1048046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dutchydoescoke/pseuds/dutchydoescoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The guard who informs him keeps his face passive and his tone even, and he hates that almost more than he hates the news.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tricks

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt over on tumblr.
> 
> Spoilers, obviously, and warning for what could be construed as self-harm.
> 
> (Terrible title due to the fact that ha, I can't name a damn thing anymore. Oops.)

The guard who informs him keeps his face passive and his tone even, and he hates that almost more than he hates the news.

He can’t control the initial reaction, the burst of power that flares out and destroys half the things in his cell, overturning the seat and splintering the foot stool.

He can control what people see, though, and he refuses to let them know how angry he is at them, at himself, because Malekith may have been the one to kill her, but if he—if he hadn’t been petty, they never would have gotten through. The Kursed would have been stuck fighting his way up, wouldn’t have made it to the shields on time. His mother would still be alive.

He employs the tricks she taught him, hiding the destruction of the room, giving everyone the illusion that his only reaction is to sit in the corner and read, while he throws the remainders of the chair and footstool, screams himself hoarse in rage and grief.

The food they bring him, paired with the news that he won’t be allowed to attend the funeral, ends up scattered across the floor, and the plate shattered from where he’d flung it in a fit of rage, because it’s _his fault_. She’d be alive if it wasn’t for him. She wouldn’t even have been injured if it wasn’t for him, and his last words to her were _you’re not_ , as if anyone else could be his mother. As if she wasn’t the one to raise him, to take him aside when Thor, fair-haired, almost literal golden child to their—to _his_ father, excelled, and taught him that physical strength wasn’t always needed. As if everything he knows wasn’t handed down from her, from the illusions he uses to the daggers that were a gift when he came of age.

He hides the shards of the plate and the remains of the food the same as the walls and the furniture, hides the blood stains when he steps on a shard and ignores the wound.

The only thing he doesn’t destroy are the books, because he’s already ruined what had been his last moments with her, he can’t destroy his last gifts.

(Thor doesn’t get that his illusions are his way of remembering her, his shapeshifting a walking, talking memorial to the days when he’d try, only a small child at the time, and come to her to fix it when he got himself stuck looking like one of the other children from the city, and she’d help change him back with a smile and stories of the time she got herself stuck looking like her mother for days on end.

But he’s not surprised. She was still the best one to understand him, after all.)


End file.
